“You want me to bring her back?”
For the first time that morning his superior smiled. “Oh, I wouldn’t trust you to retrieve a lost shoe, Marcus.” He let the contempt in his voice sink in before he added, “But who else can I send? I’ll not risk other men’s lives for your mistakes. No one but you knows where to find the runaways.”
“I can’t bring them all back on my own!”
“No. Well, Festus doesn’t much care what fate befalls the others. Kill them. Bring back their heads. Or leave them be – it’s as you see fit. But he will have her back, and he will have her back alive. Or it will be your neck that feels the sword.”
Marcus protested, “I can’t go in and drag her out. She’s among her own people. She’s protected.”
“There will be a way. I suggest you find it. You have an imagination, don’t you? This time try putting it to better use.”
V
The only place to go was the tavern. The only thing to do was to drink himself senseless. He found a squalid dive where his face wasn’t known and ordered a jug of wine. But he was still only halfway towards oblivion when his sister slipped into his mind.
He’d not thought of Phoebe for years. But a vision of her suddenly filled his head.
Her, kneeling.
His father.
Her face.
Eyes tight shut. Trying not to cry out. Biting her lip so hard blood was running down her chin.
Instinct had propelled him across the room. He’d run at his father, yelling and screaming, fists flailing.
Primus, taken by surprise, had been knocked off balance. He’d landed heavily, cracking his head on the floor.
Marcus had seized his sister by the hand, pulled her up. Urged her to come with him. To run. To hide.
But she had not.
She’d merely looked at him. Looked with eyes that were suddenly those of a stranger; eyes whose expression he couldn’t begin to understand. They were no longer those of his older sister. No longer those of a girl at all. Instead they brimmed with age-old weariness and sorrow.
She’d stared at him. One, two, three heartbeats.
And then she’d shaken her head. Turned away. Turned back towards his father. Knelt down on all fours. Lifted her dress.
Marcus drank deep. He was angry. Sweating. Feeling the same rage and confusion that he’d felt at ten years old.
He’d tried to save her. She’d refused.
Bitch. Two-faced, treacherous, self-serving whore!
Shock had carried him through the beating his father ordered. He’d barely registered the first bite of the whip. Rage and resentment had shielded him from pain.
He’d not wasted a single thought on her from that day to this.
Until now.
Why? Why was he thinking of her? What had happened to him?
Something had changed.
He drank. And drank. But the peace of oblivion eluded him. Memories of Phoebe came thick and fast and when he finally left the tavern for his bed, they snapped at his heels as he staggered through the streets.
Phoebe. And her mother. Hera. The woman who’d raised them both after his own mother had died.
Sold.
She’d sung to him. Soothed him out of nightmares. He and Phoebe had clung to her in storms when thunder and lightning raged overhead.
Only the gods knew where she was now.
That night, alone in his room, he dreamed he was back in Rome.
His father’s house. The corridor. Vast. Cavernous. As he walked along its length, solid ground became liquid beneath his feet. It heaved, sticky and fluid. Sucking with each step.
The noises. Echoing. Wails. Whimpers.
The door gigantic. Yawning open with a monstrous creak. Going in.
Seeing his father across a vast distance. And the girl kneeling on the bed, raising her head. Her anguished face. Looking at him.
A girl with Phoebe’s blonde hair.
But Cassia’s eyes.
He cried out. Snapped awake. Sat up, swung around, feet on the floor, standing, ready to run. Ready to intervene.
But the room was dark. Cold. It took a few moments for him to realize he wasn’t at home.
But those eyes. They’d burned into him the way they had when Cassia told him why she’d run from her master. But no! No, no, no! This hadn’t happened to Cassia.
She’d fled.
Why hadn’t Phoebe?
The answer came, glib and pat, the way it always had. He heard his father’s voice, whispering into his ear so softly. So patiently. Because she was a slut. A whore. She’d wanted it. Planned it. Plotted to take her mother’s place. She’d teased and tempted Primus until he’d yielded. Women were like that.
He remembered his own response. A faint protest.
“She was crying.”
“Women do,” his father had replied. “It’s the way they are. It means nothing. They do it for their own benefit. They’re manipulative creatures. Don’t give them the chance to tug at your heartstrings. They’ll only exploit you.”
And then another voice was in his head.
Cassia’s.
“No.”
In the dark stillness before the dawn – half waking, half sleeping – he heard her clearly.
“She had nowhere to run.”
The truth settled in his guts like a lead weight. If Phoebe had taken his hand, they wouldn’t even have got out of the room, much less away from the villa. Her situation was hopeless from the moment their father had touched her. And she’d known it.
Why hadn’t he?
Pain bent him in two. He crumpled back onto the narrow bed. For the first time he saw that it had been easier to blame his sister than think about why she’d shaken her head. Easier to believe his father than oppose him.
A sob rose in his throat. This was Cassia’s fault. Gods! What had she done to him? He curled into a ball. Shut his eyes. But he did not sleep again.
VI
A personality that had taken years to construct could not be taken apart overnight. There was no sudden moment of revelation. No clouds parted. Jupiter hurled no bolts of lightning from the sky.
And yet, in the days that followed Marcus’s return to Londinium, there was a change in his perception. Everything seemed askew. He felt an unease that grew and spread until everything he saw, everything he touched, everything he tasted dripped with it.
Word of his disgrace passed from mouth to mouth until the whole of Londinium knew of it. He’d been able to find only the shabbiest lodgings in the seediest part of town. The men he’d once drunk with didn’t wish to be tainted by association. Until he returned Cassia to her master he was dishonoured. Bad luck was infectious, he knew that. In their position he’d have done the same. He didn’t blame his former friends. But it meant he was alone, standing on the outside looking in. Scarcely knowing how it had happened, he began to see the place through Cassia’s eyes.
Soon after he came back to the city there was a games. Gladiators. Beasts. The spectacle would distract him from his troubles, he thought. But sitting there among his fellow citizens, an unpleasant sensation seeded itself in his guts. As the day wore on, it grew until tendrils of doubt were winding around his heart and mind. Once he’d have revelled in the slaughter, but he now began to wonder at its mindless brutality.
He found he couldn’t walk past the slave market. Whereas before he’d seen only goods and chattels, now he saw people. Broken. Desperate. A few days after he’d dreamed of Phoebe, he saw a wealthy merchant squeezing the breasts of a young girl who stood on the auction stand. He’d had to fold his arms, turn on his heel, walk swiftly in the other direction to avoid intervening. For an insane moment he’d itched to slap the man’s hands away. It had flashed through his mind that he should buy her himself simply so that he could turn her free. Madness. He couldn’t save her! He couldn’t save any of them. Slavery was the grease that oiled the wheels of the Empire. There was nothing to be done about it!
But he’d a
voided the market and the area around it after that.
Yet there was no way of not seeing or noticing the slaves that ran through the streets doing their masters’ bidding. They’d been all but invisible to him a few short months ago. Now eyes seemed to burn with accusation from every face.
And it was not simply the slaves he viewed through shattered glass. It was his own countrymen. Where once he’d seen superiority now he saw arrogance. Pride. Corruption. When he looked at the Forum, he saw a monstrous edifice built on stolen land. He pictured the broken bodies of the slaves forced to construct it. These temples, these palaces, these public buildings: they were golden facades built on the vast, mass grave of native Britons.
He saw an Empire withered and rotten to the heart.
A Roman should not think these things! He feared he was losing his mind. His former confidence, his old assurance, his brazen swagger – the harder he tried to catch onto it, the more it evaded his grasp.
One day a sudden recollection dropped into his head.
He had been young then: how old? Five perhaps. Or six. He had been crawling through the garden in pursuit of Phoebe when he’d come face to face with a snake. It was a milky-eyed thing: blind, he’d thought. Bound to starve.
He’d taken a stone in his hand meaning to put it out of its misery. But he didn’t know how to kill a snake, so he’d watched it instead. For no apparent reason it had started throwing itself about in the most hideous contortions. And then, before his eyes, its skin had split.
He’d never run so fast in his life!
He remembered the panic that had seized him. How he’d fled screaming for Phoebe. How she’d calmed him. How they’d crept back and found the creature basking in the sun. It had sloughed off its old skin and emerged, shining and new, a creature reborn, its eyes black and clear.
He was the snake now, he thought. He felt as though scales had peeled from his eyes. He was seeing the world afresh. His vision was sharp. It should have been intoxicating.
But when he thought of Cassia, and what he was duty-bound to do, he would have given anything to be back in his old, familiar skin.
Constantius Scipio left Marcus to consider his plans for Cassia’s retrieval without interference. It was no easy task, and so he was given plenty of time to fathom out a scheme that would not fail. Days turned into weeks.
Night after night he saw her in his dreams. There on the bridge, her dress dripping wet. Standing, while he cut her hair. Red curls falling to the floor of his room. Cassia in her village, in native dress, dripping with gold.
And then one night he was there on the road with her. The oxen lame. The sound of an animal padding after them in the dark gloom. The bear attacking.
He was riding after her, through the nightmare of the woods.
Seeing her standing there, facing it down.
Kissing her.
Breaking free.
Watching her unwind her brother from the shroud. But the boy’s face wasn’t that of Rufus.
It was his own.
The dream did not fade with the sunrise. There was a message there that he could not comprehend. He sat and worried at it the length of that day. And slowly, slowly, he saw that meeting Cassia had been a tremor that started an earthquake. A hairline fracture had cracked the earth under his feet. Light was leaking into a dark crypt and things that had lain dead and buried for years had been exposed to the sun, little by little.
He began to perceive that he himself had behaved like Rufus. After Phoebe had been attacked by his father, after he’d been beaten – he’d been so afraid. Lost. Lonely. And then – when his father had come to him with open arms – he’d been grateful for every crumb of kindness thrown by the man who’d ordered his beating. He’d made an idol of him. Turned him into a god. Created a perfect statue of marble and gold and sat at its feet worshipping.
From that day to this he’d been in thrall. His father’s fool. His loyal and willing slave.
The moment of realization was so shattering that Marcus was amazed the whole of Londinium did not hear the sound. The statue he’d constructed in his mind, the idol of his father, was falling. Smashing into pieces. Crumbling into dust.
Cassia had broken the chains that bound her.
Was it possible that he could do the same?
VII
It was another month before he returned to the Forum to give a full and detailed account of how he proposed to redeem himself and, when he finally did, Marcus Aurelius Aquila did not disappoint his superior.
His father had told him a tale once. That of a horse: a magnificent beast, black as night, with a perfect circle on its forehead that shone white as the moon.
Such a horse had never been seen before. It was a creature a god would be proud to ride. Man after man tried to tame it. Man after man died in the attempt. It was so wild that the creature was worthless. In time no man dared even get near it. And so it was decided that the animal would be slaughtered for meat.
On the day of its execution a young lad – twelve or thirteen years old, no more than that – watched men surround the horse, their spears poised. It reared and stamped, but was so magnificent that none of them dared throw their weapons. The boy studied its movements, observed its rolling eyes, its laboured breath. But he and he alone wondered what made the animal behave so. As it whirled and spun, he realized it was wild with fear, and that what scared it was its very own shadow.
Bursting between the men, he seized the horse’s bridle and pulled its head towards the sun.
And all at once that rearing, plunging beast became calm. It stood, sweating, its flanks heaving. But it did not paw the ground or roll its eyes. It did not kick or bite the young man who held it. Slowly its nostrils ceased flaring. It lowered its head. It allowed him to stroke its neck. And then it stood still while he vaulted onto its back. He alone was able to ride it because he alone had found out its secret fear.
The words his father had spoken had been ringing loud and clear in his mind all week.
“Men are like animals, my son: each one has a terror all of his own, and with each man it is different. But find his secret fear, and you will put a bridle on the man. You will ride him, though he knows it not.”
Find the secret fear.
Well, he knew Cassia’s.
He had seen it in her eyes that night. Seen it again in his dream. Her fear of violation. Of being taken against her will.
He would make use of that, he told Constantius Scipio. “She also has a strong sense of justice. She wouldn’t want someone else to be suffering in her place.”
“Go on.”
“I’ll tell her that her master has bought a new girl. I’ll propose we rescue her. I’m sure Cassia will come away happily if that’s the plan.”
“She’d be brave enough to come back this side of the wall?”
“I’m certain of it. And I’ll have men waiting. The moment she’s crossed over she will be captured. Imprisoned.”
“And the others? You plan to leave them there?”
“No.”
“He is less concerned about them.”
“I know that. But I’d have them back for my own honour, sir. I can’t rest easy until the wrong I’ve done is put right.”
“What do you propose?”
“To use her as bait to tempt them out.”
“You think they’ll come looking for her?”
“They owe her their freedom. They won’t give her up lightly.”
“You’d risk a war with her people?”
“There is risk of one in any case, isn’t there? But we have the advantage now: we know where their stronghold is. If they threaten to rise against us, why then, I can lead our men to their village myself.”
“You’d do this?”
“Willingly. I’ve sunk very low, sir. I’d do anything to climb out of the hole I’ve dug for myself.”
Constantius Scipio surveyed him thoughtfully. Marcus’s eyes burned with zeal, with ambition and with suppressed fur
y against the girl who’d been the cause of his humiliation.
When Marcus left the Forum, there was a spring in his step and he had not a single misgiving.
He’d convinced him. His superior had believed every word. Thank the gods! Constantius Scipio had seen nothing of what truly lay in his heart.
Marcus Aurelius Aquila left for the north the following morning with the protective blessing of Rome draped about his shoulders like a cloak.
He’d sworn on his father’s honour that the task would be done: before too long, Cassia would be delivered to her master.
It was a vow he would feel no remorse about breaking.
VIII
When he left Londinium, Marcus meant only to get back to Cassia. He would tell her everything there was to know about him, he’d decided: the plain truth, ugly though it was. He must confess that he’d thought her a spy and conspired against her. That, since then, he’d changed his mind. Changed sides. Lied to his superior. Given a false description of where her village lay. Vowed to bring her back to her master with no intention of actually doing so.
What happened after that would be for her to decide.
Having turned his face to the north, he couldn’t ride fast enough. He could do with Perseus’s winged sandals, he thought. Or Pegasus, instead of a shaggy native pony. He muttered half-crazed requests for divine intervention under his breath yet for mile after mile he remained stubbornly land-bound.
The gods did not help him. Indeed, difficulties beset him every step of the way. But then, he was not doing the bidding of Rome’s deities any more, was he? It was not surprising they cast obstacles in his path.
His horse was lame at the end of the first day. The replacement he bought turned out to be a broken-winded thing that scarcely lasted the length of the next before dropping dead two miles short of his night’s planned destination. He’d had to leave it by the side of the road for wolves to tear at and go on towards the town on foot.
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